Thursday, August 14, 2008

Pretty amazing... The concept ships blog has been up for a year already. This place has changed a lot since its inception and I've learned a ton about blogging since the launch. I hope no one finds this to be pretentious or ill conceived but... Given the anniversary of concept ships and the traffic that this blog has been getting as of late, I thought I would properly introduce myself and show some work... Not too much love shown on the other art forums (except for CG Channel and CorelDRAW [THANKS!]) so I have to front page myself:} HA.....Ha. Not that I think my works are up to par with a lot of the art that has been displayed here over the year but it is different enough to show ... I hope. Okay so... My name is Igor, I just turned 37 on July 20th... (Which is probably too old to run a spaceship art blog;) and these are the oldest pieces of art I own. I did these around 1987 or so, very much inspired by the Robotech series and Eastman & Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles books.

Omega 4 straight ahead? Wow... That is about as corny as the cargo pants I'm wearing in my animated header. I had no idea who I was at this point in time, I just knew I was better at drawing technical objects rather than life drawing and the like. I drew the pic below sometime in 1989. I found the wide spectrum of Berol Prisma colors yielded results similar to those in the treatment of vinyl cels found in Japanese animation. I had no clue about subtlety and layering of the colors and used them very crudely in an opaque manner.

Could that planet look any flatter? And what's up with the perspective on the windshield piece. Woah. Broke as no joke, I scored a t-shirt airbrush job, figuring that would be good experience for film model miniature work. I also started taking design classes at a local technical school. This "animation" was done around 1992, obviously influenced by Japanese anime and Manga. I actually bought a registration board with cels and vinyl from Cartoon color but never did get to shoot it with a camera and it was only a few years ago that the cels were compiled with the airbrushed background in Photoshop and Flash.

I knew that I would probably never be able to do Chuck Jones style of animating but I very much enjoyed the technical process of animation... Perhaps that is why anime was so interesting to me, lower quality anime held frames for long periods of time with only certain smaller looped elements utilizing motion. This set of ships was done in 1994. It was a turning point in the way I approached technical art as I began to utilize perspective in my drawings. I kept these with me at the t-shirt shop I worked at, hoping I would show them to George Lucas when he walked in to buy a shirt... Wow... What a goon.

From there on I studied a lot of 35mm photography and video... From Hi-8 to digital, shooting, editing and compositing. Also took up drafting which led me to discover digital vector illustration and modeling. Here is some of my most recent stuff. Thanks! Some older vector illustration work from around 2004... I use CorelDRAW.

The image above is a CorelDRAW vector illustration that was rasterized and lit up in Lightwave. Below was a test to see if I could export the vector data in EPS format and retain the information along with precise pivot points in Lightwave. Here is the test.

This is my most recent concept ship vector illustration. Around 2,500 shapes/layers.

Some Photoshop sketches... Still working on my raster techniques.

Here is some of my most recent work.

These loops were done for CG Society's EON challenge. You can see my entry HERE! I am most fascinated by animated Flash loops at the moment, like the ones pictured above. I think of new uses for these types of applications all of the time. The fact that they play real time at 24 or even 30 frames per second at high resolutions like 720 & 1080p is very interesting. Adding sound, linking and random math scripts make Flash a very important and powerful program. Below are some attempts at modeling. I am still needing to learn how to do proper spline modeling... It is eluding me atm.